Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (374 page)

 
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A tall narrow window with a pointed top.

 
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A Danish term, literally meaning ‘taking land’, usually applied to the process of forest clearance in preparation for farming. The term was introduced to the archaeological literature by J. Iversen in 1941 when describing the results of his investigations of pollen profiles in Denmark. He found charcoal layers associated with falls in the proportion of forest tree pollen, a rise in non-tree pollen, and in some cases cereal and cultivation-weed pollen at the same horizon. Iversen proposed that these changes were the kind of indicators that would be expected as a reflection of forest clearance for cultivation. The fact that these clearance episodes were not all of the same date, and that some pollen profiles had more than one phase of clearance, led to the suggestion that some kind of shifting cultivation was happening in the early and middle Neolithic of northern Europe. This is now generally rejected, although the term remains a useful one, recognizing that much early Neolithic clearance was highly localized.

 
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A 12th century
ad
compilation of traditions about the colonizers of Iceland:
The Book of Settlements
.

 
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Initially introduced into English with reference to paintings and particular ways of seeing the world from the Dutch
landskap
, the idea of the landscape has gradually expanded to embrace what is perhaps better described as the countryside. The historical depth to the landscape has in a sense been recognized since the time of the first antiquarian investigations; the contribution that the past makes to the present shape, feel, and form of the landscape, and our appreciation of it, is something that came into sharp focus through the work of W. G.
HOSKINS
during the 1950s and 1960s. More specifically, landscape is seen as the social construction of space, containing a bundle of practices, meanings, attitudes, and values. As such, it is a term appropriate to a humanistic understanding of the environment.

 
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A major branch of study within archaeology that draws on archaeological, historical geography, human geography, ecology, anthropology, and place-name studies. A number of different approaches have been, and continue to be, used which fall into two main areas. First is the largely
descriptive
work of mapping and plotting archaeological features over wide areas and then trying to work out their sequence and patterns of contemporaneity. Such work usually produces a series of extremely useful phase plans or snapshot images of the physical arrangement of the landscape at a point in time. Second is the
interpretative
work that focuses on the social use of space by past communities, together with their comprehension and engagement with the world. The application of
PHENOMENOLOGY
here has proved illuminating. The greatest significance of all landscape archaeology is the way it has replaced the focus on single tightly defined sites with an interest in much bigger areas that are more closely matched with the physical scale at which human societies operate.

 
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